Background
Constantine Henry Phipps was the son of Henry Phipps, the first Earl of Mulgrave. He was born on 15 May 1797.
politician statesman Home Secretary
Constantine Henry Phipps was the son of Henry Phipps, the first Earl of Mulgrave. He was born on 15 May 1797.
He was educated at Harrow and at Trinity College, Cambridge.
In 1918 he entered Parliament as M.P. for Scarborough, the seat his father had once represented. He made a successful maiden speech before the Commons in 1819, in favor of Catholic emancipation, a cause that his father had accepted after 1812. Unlike his father, he was also in favor of parliamentary reform. Soon afterward he left the House of Commons to live for a time in Italy.
He returned the House of Commons as M.P. for Higham Ferrers in 1822. His liberal interests drew him to the Whigs, with their emphasis on the control of the monarch through Parliament, and he became a great supporter of George Canning. He became M.P. for Mahon in 1826. In 1831 he succeeded his father to the earldom of Mulgrave, with a position in the House of Lords. In 1832 he was appointed captain-general and governor of Jamaica. During his tenure there he was involved in suppressing a rebellion and later in distributing financial compensation to slaveholders whose slaves had been emancipated. He resigned from this office in 1834, in the expectation that Lord Grey would offer him a cabinet post in his new ministry. Instead he was offered the relatively minor post of postmaster-general, which did not entitle him to a role in the cabinet. In July 1834, however, when Lord Melbourne formed a new ministry, Mulgrave was given the post of Lord Privy Seal, which brought with it a seat in the cabinet.
In 1835, Mulgrave became lord lieutenant of Ireland. In February 1839, he became secretary of war and the colonies. In May 1839 the Melbourne ministry was defeated on the Jamaica Bill, and for a short time it appeared that either Sir Robert Peel, of the Conservatives, or Mulgrave would be asked to form a government. In the end, the Melbourne ministry survived and Mulgrave remained at the Colonial Office. On 30 August 1839 he was made home secretary, and he remained in that post until the Melbourne ministry fell in September 1841.
Mulgrave later fulfilled a number of diplomatic roles in other Whig ministries. He was ambassador in Paris from 1846 to 1852, and it was his opposition to Lord Palmerston’s hasty recognition of Louis Napoleon as the legitimate leader of France that led to Palmerston’s dismissal in 1851. In December 1856, Mulgrave was made minister to the court of Tuscany at Florence, where his strong Austrian sympathies proved an embarrassment. He was recalled to England in 1858 and, for the rest of his life, joined his Tory opponents in opposing the Whig ministry of Lord Palmerston, whom he abhorred. He died on 28 July 1863.
He attempted to create more administrative and executive positions for Catholics and to reduce the number of positions controlled by Protestants. Daniel O’Connell, the leading advocate of Catholics’ rights and of political independence for Ireland, wrote, “We have an excellent man in Lord Mulgrave, the new lord lieutenant”.
In 1918 he married Maria, the eldest daughter of Thomas Henry Liddell, the first Lord Ravensworth.
